It’s their (tea) party and they can cry if they want to

The Denver[1] version of the tea-party protests was pretty much a middle-of-the-road spectacle, but bigger than a lot of the recent protests on the west steps of the Gold Dome, and it was certainly boisterous enough that we could hear the cheers and jeers.

(The west-steps area is clearly visible to The Post’s editorial board offices, so we see a lot of these.)

After watching through the glass (such journalism!) as they strolled with their colorful signs back to downtown, my wild guess is that most of the folks who gathered weren’t the unaffiliated voters who crossed over on Election Day to give Obama his victory; they were the die-hard conservatives who voted against him.

Maybe everything worth saying about the tea parties[2] has already been said, but I saw this point from Mona Charen [3]at the National Review Online[4], who was writing to chide the mainstream media for dissing the protests, and thought it compelling. (I didn’t mean to ignore them, Mona! We were in meetings! I’ve since read all about them! I swear it! (But after covering protesters during the Democratic and Republican national conventions, I’m on doctor’s orders to avoid such things for at least a year.))

Charen notes that that federal tax rates for the working class and the middle class are roughly half what they were before Ronald Reagan[5] reaped political gains by lowering tax rates.

Pre-Reagan, a median family of four paid about 12 percent of total income in federal taxes. (And that checks out. According to the Tax Policy Center[6], which here lists average rates [7]from 1955 forward, last year that median family paid just under 6 percent. So not much!)

Charen continues (and the emphasis at the kicker is mine):

A recent Gallup poll found that only 46 percent of Americans say their taxes are “too high.” Fifty-two percent of those earning between $30,000 and $75,000 said their taxes were “about right.” IRS data show why this should be so. Those earning more than $388,806 in 2006, the top 1 percent of earners, paid about 40 percent of the taxes. The top 5 percent, those earning above $153,542, paid 60 percent of the taxes. And the top 10 percent, those earning more than $108,904, paid more than 70 percent of all taxes. Some, including President Obama, argue that the wealthy were disproportionately benefited by the Bush era tax cuts. But as the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett has pointed out, the tax share shouldered by the wealthy increased more than the share of income going to that group during the past decade.

Still, the numbers suggest that income tax reductions are not going to be the royal road back to popularity for the Republican Party. The path back to political viability will have to be found elsewhere.

Yes, many of the tea-party protesters are serious-minded enough to argue that talking about their tax rate misses their more-important argument: That Obama’s enormous spending plans add up to enormous deficits and debts, which are bad for the country’s future and which will force higher taxes eventually.

But if that’s an argument too speculative or too removed from the daily lives of most voters, and it probably is, then Obama has little to fear from the don’t-tread-on-me types we saw gathered at the capitol.

According to the Gallop figures, most of us must consider the tax protesters as out-there as most other garden-variety protesters – maybe even not unlike those weird anarchists during the political conventions that have me so jittery.